3.6. Viewing Comments

From the "View Topic" page (see Section 3.5.1), the "Topic Comments" tab can be clicked to view the comments associated with a topic. This can be clicked at any stage to see what comments have been submitted against a review. It is often necessary for the author once a review has been completed, to work their way through the comments from the browser, although they can do this with their email client as well (assuming $allow_comment_email is true in codestriker.conf), since each comment will generate an email message. An example screenshot of the "Topic Comments" page can be seen in Figure 3-10.

A separate heading is shown in the display, for each comment thread, which represents a series of comments made against a specific code line. For each thread, all of the comments made are shown, including author and date information. For each comment thread, the current values of the comment metrics associated with the thread will be displayed. In this example, there is only a single comment metric clled "Status". The metric values associated with the thread can be updated by changing the value of the metric dropdowns, and clicking the "Update" button at the bottom of the page.

For each comment thread, there are three links to other Codestriker screens. The first link will bring up a "View File" page (see Section 3.5.3) centered on the line number of the comment, "Parallel" will do the same, by using the parallel view, and the "Add comment" link will bring up the "Add Comment" window (see Section 3.5.2) for that line number.

In this particular example, there are two comment blocks, for file codestriker/codestriker.pl, on lines 27 and 60.

At the top of this page are a number of filtering options, which control what comments are displayed. Comments can be filtered by the author of the comment and/or specific comment metric values. In addition, for each comment block, it is also possible to display the context of the topic text the comment block is made against (as is done for the "Add Comment" page, see Section 3.5.2). These controls provide the capability for generating code review reports, which can then be used at code inspection meetings.